Celebrating Black History Month with Camilla Williams

It’s a sad thing to read an obituary and discover that someone wonderful was alive for many years and you never knew it. It happens to me a lot. The only saving grace is that now, at last, I know about them and I know they made a difference and I’m grateful.

Camilla Williams. Photo by Carl Van Vechten, 1946.

Today, I’m grateful for Camilla Williams. That she died the other day, at the beginning of Black History Month, means that many people who have never heard of her will learn of her significance at just the right time. Camilla Williams was the first black woman to sing with a major United States opera company. She did that nearly a decade before Marian Anderson graced the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, only she sang with the Met’s poorer cousin, the newly formed New York City Opera.

 
Camilla Williams was born in 1919, the daughter of a chauffeur and a domestic worker in the then Jim Crow town of Danville, Virginia. Her family was musical,, but she might not have discovered opera if a Welsh singing teacher hadn’t come to town. He’d heard there were beautiful black voices in town: he wasn’t allowed to teach them in the white college where he worked, so the class met in a private home, and at twelve years old Camilla Williams learned to sing Mozart.

 
Because she had a voice that was operatic and marvelous, and despite the racism of the music business and the nation, she managed to embark on a modest concert career by the time she was in her twenties. Her big break came in 1944 at a recital in Stamford, Connecticut when she attracted the attention of one of the most important singers of the first half of the 20th century, Geraldine Farrar. Taken by Camilla Willliam’s singing, Farrar contacted an impresario with the suggestion that he manage her career. Remembered Ms. Williams, “He didn’t believe the great Farrar would take time to write a letter about an unknown little colored girl” and called Farrar to be certain the note was from her. “When [he] confirmed it really was Miss Farrar, he was dumbfounded.”

 

 

Farrar also contacted the director of the newly founded New York City Opera and suggested an audition.Two years later, when the war with Japan ended and Madame Butterfly once again became acceptable fare, Camilla Williams debuted as Cio-Cio-San, the same role Geraldine Farrar had introduced at the Met in 1907. “Raved the New York Times, “there was a warmth and intensity in her singing that lent dramatic force of no mean order to the climactic episodes, and something profoundly human and touching in her delivery ….”
Over the next eight years she sang roles like Nedda (Pagliacci), Mimi (Boheme) and Aida at New York City. She also appeared with the Boston Lyric Opera and the Vienna State Opera, and was a soloist with some of the world’s leading orchestras. She sang Bess for what was then the most complete recording of “Porgy and Bess” (Columbia Records), and toured worldwide as a recitalist.

 
Over the years, she crossed paths with Marian Anderson many times. At the 1963 March on Washington, she sang “The Star Spangled Banner,” just before Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, substituting for Anderson who was caught in traffic. The two women were fast friends.

Even though Camilla Williams never achieved the fame of her friend, she enjoyed a life in music. Her voice is very different from the Anderson’s dark contralto. It’s a lyric soprano’s voice—light, bright and shimmering at the top. You can hear it on a recording of an early recital on YouTube. There’s also a brief speech that she gave at a tribute for singer Giulio Gara. Talking about some of the problems she’s encountered because of race over the years, she tells a wonderfully funny story of a tenor whose racism made it difficult for him to sing with her. Ah, but she inadvertently got her revenge when they did a love duet and “he touched me and something happened to his body—his face got so red and he was so embarrassed but I paid no attention….”
Of the racism she struggled against for most of her life she said, “There is no place for bitterness in singing. It works on the cords and ruins the voice. In his own good time, God brings everything right.”
Ms. Williams was married to a civil rights attorney for 19 years until his death in 1969. She taught singing first in New York City and then at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music at Bloomington, where she retired in 1997.
Which takes me to the part of the story I like best because it’s about the elderly Camilla Williams, who continued to charm everyone. She was always outgoing, vivacious, critical and “a consummate diva.” Recalls a friend, “She’d always dress as if she was going to be soloing at an opera. She never went out without a gorgeous hat, a beautiful umbrella, heels and a mink stole.”
In 1947, she had met Bulgarian-born pianist, Boris Bazala, who became her accompanist. The two traveled and concertized together for many years, and remained friends for the decades after. Bazala remembered the challenges she faced because of  her race. He insisted on riding in the back of the train when she was only permitted to ride in front; often, they couldn’t sit together in restaurants. After his wife died, the two friends lived together and continued making music together until he died at 100 last year. Every day was a celebration of their friendship— the refugee from Eastern Europe and the woman who “opened the door for Marian Anderson.”.

The world is alive with revelations in art, economics (!) and music

Life is full of surprises and even revelations, and I’ve received several of those lately. Instead of writing a long blog about any one of them, I’m going to tell you who, what and where and fill it all in with a few quotations.

Lucian Freud. Self Portrait, Reflection, 2002.

In Art

The first is an article about Lucian Freud, someone I’ve never known much about. I was aware he died recently, and as is the case with far too many of this world’s wonders, it took the man’s death to bring him to my notice. There’s a terrific article in the February Vanity Fair about Freud. Written by David Kamp, it’s worth reading from top to bottom, but I’d like to quote just a little from the beginning because it has to do with an artist in old age, which is what this blog is supposed to be about—at least occasionally!

Lucian Freud’s final portrait is of a naked man and a dog. It is unfinished but otherwise betrays no sign of the agedness of its creator, who died last July 20, halfway through his 89th year. The scale is big, a square canvas of about five feet by five feet, and the brushwork is as sure and layered as in any painting he had ever done—smooth and free around the man’s shoulders, crusty and impastoed along the arms. The palette is Caucasian-fleshy from afar but remarkably varied and intricate up close: purples and greens in the man’s legs, vivid streaks of yellow in his right hand, rust and blue at the naughty bits.

For the last 57 years of his life, Freud painted standing up rather than sitting down; the physical restrictions of seated painting, he said, had begun getting him “more and more agitated” in the 1950s, so he kicked the chair away. Painting on his feet required extraordinary stamina, given Freud’s self-imposed work schedule: a morning session with one model, an afternoon break, and an evening session with another model, seven days a week, all year round. What’s more, these sessions had a tendency to stretch on: a deliberate worker, Freud took 6, 12, 18 months or longer to complete a painting, marathoning into the night if the mood struck. But he had stamina in spades. Painting was his workout; he took no other exercise, and yet photographs of him working shirtless in 2005, when he was 82, show him to be lean and all sinew, a jockey-size Iggy Pop.

But by June 2011, Freud recognized that his body was finally failing him, and that he had only so many brushstrokes left. The naked man in the portrait was completed, but the dog, a tan-and-white whippet, would never get its hind legs. Freud prioritized its head and face, adding a little dart of terre verte (“green earth”) mixed with umber to depict the tip of the animal’s pricked-up right ear. In early July, Freud was addressing the painting’s foreground: the folds and ripples in the sheet that covered the low platform upon which his two models sprawled. Here and there, as his energy permitted, he applied quick strokes of flake white, a thick, lead-heavy paint, to the lower part of the canvas.

That was as far as he got. Able to stand no longer, he at last retired to his bedroom, one floor up from the studio he kept in his Georgian town house in West London. As he lay in bed, friends and family gathered to pay their respects. There were many visitors from both categories. Freud had an otherworldly magnetism that his intimates struggle to put into words. Deborah Cavendish, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, once ascribed to him “a sort of starry quality … an extraordinary sort of mercurial thing. He’s like something not quite like a human being, more like a will-o’-the-wisp.” Over the course of his life he fathered 14 acknowledged children with six women. Among his nine daughters are the fashion designer Bella Freud and the novelist Esther Freud. Two weeks into their bedside vigil, he was gone.
….
Freud simply did great work as an old man, some of his greatest. “In a sense, I think he knew this was his last big push at making some remarkable works. I could just see that he was really ambitious, pushing as hard as he could,” says the naked man in that final painting, David Dawson, the artist’s longtime assistant and the owner of Eli, the whippet star of several late paintings. ….
This overdrive work ethic was at once an acknowledgment of pending mortality and a hedge against it. Dawson marvels at what his boss managed to achieve. “The sheer volume, the scale,” he says. “He never rushed the work. But, my God, one great painting after another came out. He felt he could do it and he was able to. And this was his last chance.”

In Economics

My next discovery, comes from the January 27 issue of  the Wall Street Journal. where Dalibor Rohac writes about Deidre McCloskey, an economist. Why have I never heard of her? McCloskey is out to bring moral values back to the history and practice of economics. Apparently, she’s funny and charismatic, as well as brilliant. She’s also someone who changed her gender mid-career, which may not be relevant to her economic philosophy, but somehow makes her very, very human.

In 2006, Ms. McCloskey published a 600-page book, “Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce.” In a meticulously documented volume, drawing from a range of philosophical traditions, she asks whether one can participate fully in the modern capitalist economy and still be a moral person. Ms. McCloskey is a free marketeer and used to be a close personal friend of Milton Friedman, as she eagerly points out. Her answer is therefore an emphatic yes. It would be ill-advised, she thinks, to claim that profit-seeking makes one inherently corrupt, especially if it is balanced by other virtues.

Four years later, she completed a 600-page sequel, “Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World.” “I’ve forgotten how to write short books,” she says apologetically, adding that she would like both to be part of a four-volume series on the bourgeois era.

….

The danger of our era is that the bourgeois deal is slowly crumbling away. It is under attack from the political left and also from economists whose work revolves around one sole virtue—prudence—thus eroding the public understanding of markets and economic life. Looking at the West’s current economic woes, it is easy to share Ms. McCloskey’s concern that unless we revive a sense of dignity and approbation for entrepreneurship and innovation, we might easily kill the goose that lays the golden eggs of our prosperity.

Oddly, I had just finished reading about McCloskey when a friend on Facebook alerted me to another article, this one in US News Today. It’s an interview with the founder of the Davos World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab.

Capitalism is out of whack, the founder of the World Economic Forum says, welcoming critics’ ideas of how to fix it — even those camped out in protest igloos near his invitation-only gathering of global VIPs.

    ….

“I’m a deep believer in free markets, but free markets have to serve society,” he said in Davos, the ski resort tucked away deep in the Swiss Alps. He lamented excesses and “lack of inclusiveness in the capitalist system.”

“We have sinned,” he said, adding that this year’s forum would put particular emphasis on ethics and resetting the moral compass of the world’s business and political community.

He even invited protesters from Occupy to share their thoughts with the Davos participants.

Maybe, just maybe there’s something stirring that will make real change possible.

Patricia Racette and Beth Clayton

In Music

The last of my revelations comes from another arena altogether. On Saturday, I was listening to the broadcast of Tosca from the Metropolitan Opera. The soprano was Patricia Racette. I had read something about her before, probably even heard her sing. She was wonderful. My curiosity was piqued and I googled her—what else?—only to discover that she was not only very lovely, she was a lesbian in a thirteen plus year relationship with another fine opera singer who was equally beautiful, Beth Clayton.  An interview with the two of them in the April 2008 issue of Afterellen was refreshing and enchanting. And also well worth reading.

I know the world is a scary place and getting scarier but my God, it’s still full of magic!

Following Madame Tussaud into the uncanny valley

The wax statue of the creator of Madame Tussaud's waxworks, Madame Tussaud herself in the museum. Photo by Rudolph Afurtdo. Creative Commons.

A decade ago, a New York Assemblyman tried to have Arafat removed from Madame Tussaud’s in New York City. He threatened to cancel a Republican fundraiser at the wax museum if the Palestinian leader wasn’t removed.
It’s not just amazing that wax museums are at least as popular as ever, but that they’re taken as seriously. Long lines formed in Washington, D.C. when Michelle Obama’s figure was unveiled. At Madame Tussaud’s in Berlin, a visitor beheaded Hitler. The costliest figure to maintain at New York City’s Tussaud’s was Brad Pitt because of the lipstick marks on his lovely waxen features.

Brad Pitt at Tussaud's

In its beginnings and still today, Madame Tussaud’s keeps up with the latest celebrities, inducting them at a rapid pace (and, I presume, although I haven’t seen evidence of it,disposing of a large number at the same rapid clip). The gestation period for each celebrity is six months and the process is lengthy and complex. As many as 250 measurements are made. Molds are taken from clay busts produced by sculptors who depend on the measurements and photographs of the subject, not real heads as in the distant past. Hot wax is poured into the molds and left to cool. When the heads are ready, hair, eyelashes, whiskers and eyebrows are plugged in, one strand at a time, a process that can take as long as five weeks. In Madame Tussaud’s earliest pieces, real teeth from the streets of Paris, were used, but today they’re made of porcelain or dental acrylic. Tussaud’s asks celebrities to donate the clothes they want their figure to be wearing. The cost to produce a figure can be as high as $300,000.
Presumably, Madame Tussaud’s is still the last word on who is and who is not a celebrity. In  2002, the wax works in London refused to include the Conservative Party leader because he was too dull. “We want figure who will inspire strong emotions and provoke strong reactions. In our view, Mr. Duncan Smith, whom most people have never heard of, is unlikely to achieve either of these feats. Ever.” There was no report of Mr. Smith’s reaction. I wonder if  he was mortified.
In Los Angeles, Tussaud’s competition with the rival Hollywood Wax Museum recently took on new life when Tussaud’s set up an exhibit in its lobby, juxtaposing its celebrity effigies with photos of the Hollywood Museum’s, beginning with Angela Jolie. It’s figures were much more lifelike, argued Tussaud’s. Fascinating that a photo of the Hollywood Museum’s Jolie stood in for the effigy. Photographs are like effigies in that they presume to be copies of what is real. In the last century, photographers would sometimes use Tussaud’s tableaus, pretending they were copies of the real event. (In fact, a photograph of the pope’s effigy was acclaimed as more true to life than the actual pope in the real setting.) The waxworks then had a policy that forbade visitors from taking photographs inside the Museum in order to keep nefarious reporters from representing them as snapshots of the real people.

Today, the Museum depends on the camera. That’s what people come to do. Not just to mingle with the famous (or rather, their facsimiles), but to record themselves in their company.

But something else is happening and that’s what makes this subject interesting. There is something oddly uncomfortable about a wax museum that can be summed up in the following remarks by a young employee at the London museum. He reported that he was often asked by visitors,

“What is it like at night?” Or my favourite. “How do you DARE to be there all alone?”I sometimes wonder if people enjoy them (the wax figures) because of the possibility of rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous, or because of the tiny little thrill of coming into a room and not knowing who is alive and who is not.

As William Poundstone writes in“The Battle of the Wax Museums,”

….the truly interesting thing about wax museums is how creepy they are. This is better described by a third-millenium coinage: the “uncanny valley.” That’s the notion that not-quite-perfect simulacra of the human form create a sense of weirdness or revulsion. .. Somewhere between the humanoid and the human, things get weird. These imperfect likenesses fall into a dip in the curve, and are much less accepted than less-perfect ones. ….

The uncanny valley explains why there are so many horror movies about evil dolls, clowns, ventriloquist’s dummies, wax museums, zombies, and cyborgs. …”
The phenomenon of the uncanny valley was observed in connection with the creation of robots. At a certain point, when the robot is very much like a human but not like one really, witnesses were seized with revulsion.

What is even more curious is how much of the thinking that’s evolved to explain the uncanny valley has to do with death.

I can’t get quite beyond this point yet, and perhaps I won’t. Any one with experience of the uncanny valley out there? I intend to give it at least one more try in these posts. Maybe more.

Because it is curious, isn’t it, that Madame Tussaud’s wax museum began in death and continues, in this later age, to be “mired” in it. I think, because automatons,wax effigies and celebrities are all related to human identity in a way that is profoundly disturbing. Our world begins to wobble when we think too hard about them.

Exhibiting death at Madame Tussaud’s

Madame Tussaud’s biographers differ about many of the details of her life. Her “uncle” may have been her father; her connections to Versailles may have been exagerrated; and, of course, she may have labored under less onerous conditions to make the wax heads of the guilllotined than her later reports suggest. It is clear, however, that she hated the perpetrators of the Revolution—those she blamed for the beheadings.

Jean Paul Marat, stabbed to death in his bathtub by Charlotte Corday, July 13, 1793. A wax model made immediately after his death.

According to her grandson, John Theodore Tussaud, in The Romance of Madame Tussaud’s, when the Revolutionary leader, Marat, was killed in his bathtub, Marie Tussaud was taken immediately to the scene of the crime and made to model his head (take a cast of his face).

 

He was still warm, and his bleedy body and the cadaverous aspect of his almost diabolical features presented a picture replete with horror, and Madame Tussaud performed her task under the influence of the most painful emotions.

 
The tableau that was presented in Paris of Marat in his bathtub is similar to the one that’s the subject of the famous painting by Jacque Louis David. The artist had been a close friend of the dead man. Where Tussaud saw “diabolical features,” David saw the features of a man he loved and admired. The representation of the murder of each is in large part the result of their relationship to the man and the French Revolution. David’s painting was lauded as the great historical painting it is. Tussaud’s depiction, on the other hand, was all about the death of a body—its abruptness, its gruesomeness.

Death of Marat by Jacques Louis David

Of course, David was an artist and Madame Tussaud was a waxworker. Apparently, Curtius’s museum wasn’t the only wax museum that featured the murder of Marat by Charlotte Corday. Some thinkers of the time worried that the attraction to violent and tragic scenes was unhealthy, that it would not lead to a society of people who could empathize with one another, but one that was brutalized and disconnected.

Although Tussaud claims to have provided the model for David’s painting, (very likely the reverse was true), the two images represent entirely different viewing experiences. In David’s painting the powerful immediacy of the scene was used to transcend the limits of death, to bring Marat back ‘tout entier….’  The waxworks tableau to be found at Curtius’s Salon, by contrast, sought to make Marat’s assassination palpable for the viewer, not to transcend but rather to capture death.

Palpable wounds were, by contrast, what Tussaud specialized in. The attraction of her waxworks depended on a kind of forensic gaze. David deploys a familiar aesthetics of martyrdom where the violated body is intended to move the viewer to the contemplation of immaterial values. Madame Tussaud’s Adjoining Room [later the Chamber of Horrors] instead concentrated on bringing death itself close, in all its abject details. Marie-Helene Huet notes, “the perversion inherent in Madame Tussaud’s peculiar art is that this art imitates death and that the product of this imitation of death is an imitation of life…In the Chamber of the Dead, the illusion of life never brings the dead back to life. On the contrary, one could say of Madame Tussaud that she brings the dead back to death.

– A Proximate Violence: Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors by Lela Graybill

The wax worker tried to copy his or her subject as nearly as possible, (whether that subject was alive or dead). The artist does more than that—art never intends to just imitate. Madame Tussaud’s has always been dedicated to getting as close to what is immediately and physically real as possible. In the beginning many of  Tussaud’s and Curtius’s figures were actually constructed from wax molds made by taking a cast the subject’s face. “From life” is very close to the real person!

Curtius and his protegé had two impulses in the creation of their wax museums: to entertain and to witness to history.

A few years after her arrival in Great Britain, Marie Tussaud searched for, found and bought parts of the guillotine. Later, she heard about and bought the carriage Napoleon rode in when he went to conquer Russia, and when he turned around and was defeated at Waterloo. John Theodore Tussaud, describes the vehicle in great detail, taking two chapters to marvel at the carriage and its contents and the great man’s past closeness to them. For many years, the carriage was displayed (along with its waxen driver) and visitors were allowed to sit inside and touch the things that had once been Napoleon’s. When some of them began taking bits of the vehicle away for mementos, a red ribbon was strung around it and visitors were no longer allowed to touch it.

Napoleon's carriage at Tussaud's

It’s amusing to read that in Curtius’s museum in Paris, rich visitors were allowed to wander around an exhibit of the royal family at supper, touching the models, while the less well-off stood in a roped-off area in the rear where they could pass the time trying to guess which of the figures below was real.
Today, if I read the situation right, visitors of every income level are allowed to fraternize with waxen celebrities. (I doubt that many of them are interested in Napoleon’s carriage, which I’m certain is  still roped off!) They come to stand next to them, to pretend that the silent figures who look so very alive but who never move, are not only the real thing, but friends, intimates even. They have their pictures taken with celebrity actors and dictators. It’s not exactly fifteen minutes of fame, but it feels close.

More next time.

When fishes are out of water

PBS ran the San Francisco Ballet’s production of  “The Little Mermaid” the other night. It was beautiful, and deeply, deeply sad. The Disney movie has Andersen’s mermaid making the transfer from fish to woman with little difficulty, but this mermaid suffers terribly. In one of the most affective performances I’ve ever seen, the dancer Yuan Yuan Tan wakes up with legs and feet, her wonderful fish tail gone. Because she’s in love with an earthling Prince, she wants legs and feet, and she counts her toes and fingers with glee, but she doesn’t know what to do with her new limbs and they dangle and tangle up with one another as, fish at heart, she tries to move through air as she had through water. It doesn’t translate.

The Mermaid and the Prince by Edmund Dulac, 1911

I’ve been thinking about it a lot—life’s different forms—like the snail I talked about in a recent post, moving without sight and sound, finding its way through life with touch, taste and smell. On a less drastic level, I’ve been reading about color-blindness, especially when it’s extreme. There are people who can see only in black and white. The wonderful Oliver Sacks tells of a painter who, mid-career, loses his ability to see color. After a period of despair and readjustment, he begins to paint in black and white. If it were possible to have his color vision restored, he wouldn’t want it. “The world he perceives is—in Sacks words, too “coherent and complete”—to want any other. To see in black and white is to see texture where you missed it before, to trace the shapes of things where you never did, to appreciate the intersection of one thing with another.

Unlike the Mermaid, the painter makes the transition, and that despite the physical disabilities the truly colorblind can face in their daily lives.

I’ll bet Matisse wouldn’t have have made the same transition. Color was essential to his being.

I know that fishiness, the life of the snail, and color vision are very different, but the painful clumsiness of the Mermaid made me think about each of us and how different we are. In The Little Mermaid, the Poet, Hans Christian Anderson, is also in love with the yellow-haired Prince. The Poet is another aspect of the Mermaid, and her creator. He has as much trouble as she does swimming through air, relating to people, achieving love.

The Poet and the Mermaid are not unlike elderly people who used to run and flex muscle, wiggle and flirt, and move from one place to another effortlessly and with style, who suddenly catch a glimpse of themselves in a mirror, or wake up with stiff joints. Things have changed. They don’t look or move the way they did. Nothing is what it was. Like the Mermaid, they’re not used to their bodies. They’ve become disjointed and turned all akimbo.

Which reminds me of a recent TV interview with Justin Hines, the wheelchair-bound Canadian singer who is seriously disabled with a rare disease called Larsen’s syndrome. When he was five or six years old, Hines recalls, he asked his mother what it felt like to walk. Taken aback, she came up with as perfect an answer as possible. She put each of his feet on her own, and holding him up, walked with him. Walking, it turned out, wasn’t at all what it was cracked up to be, remembers Hines.  How much better to roll around on four wheels.

Death at The Turquoise Door

I walked into The Turquoise Door in Austin, Texas and found Death singing, playing cards, feasting on tamales and papayas, and riding bicycles. It was moving in procession down the length of counters and across tables. I could almost hear the percussion of its bones. Its many moods could not be seen in its bony faces: skulls are less malleable even than botoxed flesh. They can neither smile or frown. But oh, the color–the liveliness of it all.

The Turquoise Door was given over to the Day of the Dead, but it wasn’t just for a day, it was a time and place where saints, demons, and human beings–living, dead–were joined in perpetual celebration of each other. Some of the figures could have filled a coffee table; others were as small as the charms for a bracelet. Clay, paper maiche, ceramic, wood–they were playing instruments–violins, concertinas, pianos, trumpets and saxophones. They were dipping and turning in dance. They were piling up marigolds. On the walls were ceremonial masks,  their empty eyes staring at the sights below.

 
There were trees of life with the Virgin Mary and apple trees at their centers, but in one the skeleton in his snappy black uniform replaced them.. Death at the heart of life.

 
I don’t know much about the Day of the Dead. I know even less about Death itself. I do know that The Turquoise Door made me laugh, and it’s not very often that Death does that.

The living and the dead

Not many weeks ago, the Israeli novelist Amos Oz was on Charlie Rose. He’s one of those people who says things we’ve heard before, but says them in a way that makes us think it’s the first time.

However, on this particular night he said something I hadn’t thought of – that Protestantism has changed our perceptions of death in the Western world. We no longer feel close to the dead. There is no continuity between the living and the dead. Shakespeare, for example, had no difficulty writing about ghosts. Oz theorizes that the end of purgatory also meant an end to spirits and their kind.

 

In Chinese and Mexican cultures, the dead are honored, even celebrated, every year. Death isn’t at all as final as it is where Protestantism and, today, science hold sway. Death is understood to be a definitive ending: My grandmother died. She went to heaven or hell, became one with the universe—or simply turned to dust. Whatever, it’s unlikely she’ll speak to me from beyond the grave.
This hasn’t always been true. Just read Splatter, a blog from Lady Marilyn Kay Dennis,  filled with tales of a not-very-long-ago time when commerce with the dead was not nearly as uncommon.

 

P.S. I wonder if the vogue for vampires doesn’t have something to do with a need to make contact with the unliving

Snapshots with the heads on

A few snapshots.

Unlike photographs or portraits they’re quick, casual glances at people. My father usually cut off the subjects’ heads. I promise, at the very least, that I won’t do that.

A few days ago I met a couple who retired into travel, Spanish immersion, writing, and music. Jenna is a historian and writer; Tom is a computer scientist and mathematician. Music was the occasion for our encounter. Our mutual friend, Sally, knew they were looking for a piano player to accompany them on Handel’s sonatas for  recorder and continuo. She knew that I’d said that I was practicing the piano hoping that I would someday be able to play with a group. Just play. Not perform. Sally, being Sally, ignored “someday” and decided that Jenna and Tom were a group.

So we’re going to try.

But aside from that, and even more curious, was Tom’s story of his venture into fiction. He’d never been interested in writing, he said, that is, until his Spanish instructor assigned a 250-word story in Spanish. It was a whole new experience. The flood gates opened and the stories poured out. All in Spanish. He still has no interest in writing in English. Of course, he and Jenna have speculated about why, and it’s fun to guess:

1) In a last life he was a Hispanic poet;

2) Spanish gives him the emotional distance he needs to tap that magic place fiction comes from;

3) Spanish closes the emotional distance so that he can tap that magic place fiction comes from;

4) Tom’s guess—it’s such a romantic language. That may say it all.

The other night I saw Kate for the first time in years. Kate used to sing everything from torch songs to blues to country. She cooks a mean meal in her industrial kitchen and makes jars of jam every year. She weaves. She runs one of the best nurseries in the area and does landscaping besides.

And the other night I discovered she remembered the Latin name for every plant I thought to mention when I and most of the people my age that I know find our nouns dropping out all the time. “Yeah, you know, that guy who founded our country…. name begins with G…. maybe it was George, George who? …. you know …. it’ll come back to me in a minute.”

I was impressed by the landscaping but really…. I don’t know how old Kate is but she’s not that far behind me!

In New York I had lunch and a museum trek with my friend, Nancy. She and her husband Barney have been potting and selling pots for the last two and more decades. How wonderful to grow old potting with someone you love! (I plan to do a post of them sometime soon.)

My friend, Steven Dansky, just celebrated his seventh marriage anniversary with his husband, Barry Safran. They were among the first to be married in Massachusetts. Steve has turned into very daring and very amazing photographer. He’s just finished his first (I think) novel and continues to write essays on gay liberation—the politics and the history. He’s still organizing!

Steve is in a great hurry because the decades are running out and he still has so much to do.

Poets and Old Age: Emily Dickinson

One of our best poets about growing older and about death was Emily Dickinson. And the best known of all her poems about the subject was this one.

The Chariot

Because I could not stop for Death,

He kindly stopped for me;

The carriage held but just ourselves

And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,

And I had put away

My labor, and my leisure too,

For his civility.

We passed the school where children played,

Their lessons scarcely done;

We passed the fields of gazing grain,

We passed the setting sun.

We paused before a house that seemed

A swelling of the ground;

The roof was scarcely visible,

The cornice but a mound.

Since then ‘tis centuries; but each

Feels shorter than the day

I first surmised the horses’ heads

Were toward eternity.

 

Here’s another less familiar one.

We turn not older with years, but newer every day.

These words they sing

Of hope

Of joy

These words leave me to

Play

Within my mind

Within my heart

Within my newer day

My newest day

Sparkling bright

Washing cares away

My newest day

Born afresh

Born afresh…

Today

Giving me

Once again

The chance to Seek

And pray

Giving me

The chance

To thank

The One who gives this day

Behold!

My newness…

Startling me

Though mirrors are away…

As in my mind

Once again

Life’s magic has its way

Has its way

Comforts me

Walks hand in hand with age

Walking towards that Promised Land…

Where newness wins the day!

Some more poetry

William Butler Yeats wrote a good bit of poetry about growing older—I’m not sure why. But this is one of his best known.

That is no country for old men. The young

In one another’s arms, birds in the trees

– Those dying generations – at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

　

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

　

O sages standing in God’s holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

　

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

– William Butler Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium

 

Here’s a very lovely poem, a very interesting poem, by Milosz.

On the day the world ends

A bee circles a clover,

A fisherman mends a glimmering net.

Happy porpoises jump in the sea,

By the rainspout young sparrows are playing

And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

　

On the day the world ends

Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,

A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,

Vegetable peddlers shout in the street

And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,

The voice of a violin lasts in the air

And leads into a starry night.

　

And those who expected lightning and thunder

Are disappointed.

And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps

Do not believe it is happening now.

As long as the sun and the moon are above,

As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,

As long as rosy infants are born

No one believes it is happening now.

　

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet

Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,

Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:

No other end of the world will there be,

No other end of the world will there be.

– Czeslaw Milosz, A Song on the End of the World (translated by Anthony Milosz)